Five Seconds of Perfect Clarity
by Audrey V
Summary: It was less than five seconds between when the gun came up and when everything went dark, but five seconds was enough. Warning: references to past violence, death & other dark topics.


After a long hiatus (computer problems + real life seriously encroaching on my fun time), I'm back with a little offering to my fellow JAM fans. This one gets dark but isn't super graphic. It was originally intended to be more about, well, dinner, but it went astray and became its own thing. Hope you enjoy!

"Let's slow this down," she said, but by that moment, both the speed and the outcome were already set, and she knew it.

It was less than five seconds between when the gun came up and when everything went dark, but five seconds was enough.

The first time she'd been shot, she felt it coming before it happened, but she didn't have enough time to catalogue her regrets. When she was recovering in the hospital, still covered in the wires and tubes that served as an umbilicus to the world of the living, she realized that if she'd died on that downtown rooftop, she would have gone into whatever afterlife existed without a firm accounting of what she should have done differently.

This time, she saw it coming, and her brain had plenty of time to clatter and race through the should've beens and never weres.

"I just don't understand why you're so against marriage, Jules." He wasn't angry. He had every right to be angry, but he just sounded tired.

"I don't want to be my folks, Sam. I saw what my mother gave up-"

"You think I'll make you quit your job and move to the country?" Frustrated, not angry.

"I think we have no idea what life is going to be like in even a few years."

"A few years isn't going to change how I feel about you."

She wanted to say it back but the words wouldn't come out. She watched as he took her silence as an insult.

This time he was angry, and when he stood up without warning, she flinched. She could stare down a loaded gun but if the sweet, gentle man she loved made one fast movement in the wrong context, she ducked her head like she was twelve again.

He saw the flinch and froze. "I'm nothing like him," he said quietly before leaving her alone with her misery.

She'd do it over and this time when he asked she'd say "yes," but in real life there are no do-overs, just regrets.

She'd do it all over if she could. She'd go back to age 17 and she'd run away from that farm as fast as her legs would take her. She'd go back to being nine and she'd hold her mother longer, as long as she could before they took her away, instead of hiding in a corner of the hospital room behind the IV stands and monitors and the morphine pump.

She'd go back to 14 and she'd stay in bed instead of easing the old wooden window open and climbing down the tree outside her window. She'd sleep through the rest of the night and her father wouldn't catch her sneaking in at 4am with her favorite sweater torn and her knees scraped and bruised. If she could, she'd go back to a time before she felt too small to protect herself, before the broken rib that hurt less than when he called her a whore.

If she could go back, she would have told Sam about where that scar on her wrist came from, and trusted that he'd love her even if she was weak. Or maybe if she had it to do again, she could have just pressed harder so she'd never have to explain it to anyone, but the distance of years and half a country had changed her. The Jules-who-was-now realized, moments before it was to end, that she'd really liked being alive.

If she had it to do over, she would have changed everything. She would have read more and argued less. She would have explored the world more. She would have taken more people to bed and she would have told them the truth, the whole truth, and maybe some of them would have surprised her by loving her anyway.

Or maybe, she thought with a rueful smile, the only thing she'd change is that she'd wear a vest on her trip to the convenience store to buy eggs and bread, so she wouldn't be dying at the hands of a scared kid who thought he could score some easy money to support his meth habit.

Regrets took up the first two seconds of the five she had in between knowing she was going to die and the searing pain in her chest. The next two were filled with flashes of the people she wouldn't get a chance to say goodbye to. The man who loved her like a real father would, the almost-brothers who'd have blocked a bullet for her rather than the ones who let her take the beatings. The man who was still asleep in bed, who'd find the note and wonder what was taking her so long, unless the call from the morgue woke him up first.

She saw them, lined up at her funeral, like they'd lined up at Lew's. From seven to six to five, although they'd eventually filled Lew's spot, even If they could never replace him. They'd fill her spot, too, and she'd be a picture on a wall. The first woman to make it into the cool pants, even though there were three of them now. Soon to be two.

The final second was a jumble, as she saw the junkie's finger twitch on the trigger. Jules set her jaw and made sure she didn't flinch. Her brain tried to cram everything into its last moment. The phone number of her best friend from grade 9 collided with the feeling of free-falling 12 stories in the air, both cascading into the clatter of Sam making breakfast and the smell of bacon and the errant thought that someone should cancel their dinner reservations.

Not her, obviously, but someone should, although the image of thestuffy maitre d' calling out "Callaghan" after she was long past answering made her giggle inside, just a little.

There was a flash then and a tiny lump of metal traveling faster than a freight train hit her in the chest. It burned just like she remembered, except this time she was alone and there would be no familiar arms carrying her to a waiting ambulance.

She heard the junkie run for the doors and felt the clerk's hands on her wound, delicate fingers trying to stop the flow of blood. The girl was saying something about 911 and how help would get there soon, but the sounds flowed into each other before they faded completely. Jules blinked, her vision clearing long enough to see that the person holding the life in her body wasn't the teenage clerk but her mother, who smiled at her reassuringly as the world went dark.

For a long time, there was nothing, but then nothing fell away and something took its place.

Her hearing came back first, although everything was muted, as if she were underwater. A rhythmic beeping was the first to break through the sludge, followed by a humming. She concentrated very hard, trying to figure out if she'd lived or if the afterlife was much less impressive than she'd expected it to be.

The humming coalesced into words as her vision started to return. "…mother of god, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Our father, who art in heaven..."

The words continued, prayers that were familiar even though she'd never actually learned them. When Spike was mumbling them at Lew's funeral, she'd wondered why the sound gave her such comfort. Much later, Sarge let it slip that Spike sat with her the first time she was shot, praying in English, Italian and Latin as if proving that he'd paid attention in mass would convince God to spare her.

Jules wasn't religious but Spike was two for two.

Her eyes fluttered open and she saw them, more than five or six. Spike was next to her, still reciting his Novenas. Sam was asleep next to him, head propped up on one hand. Beyond the glass, Sarge and Ed, flanked by Donna, Leah and Wordy, who rocked a sleeping child in his arms.

She blinked back tears for a moment and in the haze, she was sure that Lew was there, tucked in between Donna and Wordy, smiling at her.

"Hey, you!" Spike abandoned his intercessions and squeezed her hand before shaking Sam awake. "She's back."

Sam bent over her, touching her face and her hands as if to reassure himself that she was still among the living. As he kissed her face, five seconds stretched out and back until she managed to lift one hand to run it through his hair.

Jules cleared her throat, wondering what obligation she had to the universe for giving her a second (or was it third?) chance. She knew she couldn't just go on as if she hadn't had those five seconds of perfect clarity, but even though she was alive she was still powerless over history.

She was alive but her mother was still dead. She would probably always flinch. Jules couldn't change what happened at nine or fourteen or seventeen or even this morning, because even a second chance isn't a do-over.

She could change what came next though. Jules rolled a word in her mouth but the sound didn't come. She looked up at Sam, looked away, and then tried again.

"Yes." Her voice was raspy and hoarse, a casualty of a recently-removed ventilator, but the word was unmistakable, a response to a question asked months rather than moments before.

"Yes?" Confused, not angry. Sam looked to Spike, who shrugged.

"Also… someone… needs to cancel… our dinner reservation." She smiled weakly up at them, while Spike laughed and Sam relaxed.

"It was three days ago. We missed it." Blue eyes, smile full of teeth. "Do you think they'll let us eat there again if we come up with a good enough excuse?"

She would have rolled her eyes but they were already drooping closed. Someday he'd ask again, like she suspected he was planning on doing during dinner at that fancy restaurant, and she wouldn't flinch.

It wasn't as monumental a shift as she might have liked, but it was a start, a baby step toward making fewer new regrets.


End file.
